My Life in Books

“Claire is full of good intentions, but sadly her practicing is sometimes put on a back burner in favour of other activities which take precedence”. So wrote my piano teacher in my Summer 1988 school report. Mr Chivers was a kindly man, and this was an equally kind interpretation of the situation. My trumpet teacher was more direct and to the point that year, suggesting that my silliness and predilection for blowing the wrong note (rather loudly) from time to time, just for laughs, was the reason my position in the orchestra was no longer tenable, even when there were no other trumpet players in the entire school.

Anyone who has been kind enough to read my earlier blog posts or follow my Instagram account cannot have failed to notice that we recently moved house (or rather moved back into our new house once the builders moved out). And so it might not be a surprise to know that the material for this post has been inspired by what I have found - and subsequently learnt about myself - whilst unpacking these boxes. The last few weeks have uncovered not only a box of school reports dating back to 1979 (Claire has very messy handwriting) but also box upon box of books. So many books! Having spent many months trying to persuade my husband that he is unlikely ever to listen again to those Berlitz “Learn Japanese”, “Learn Portuguese”and “Learn Mandarin” tapes from the 1980s, not least because the double tape deck that he insists on hanging onto stopped working over 25 years ago, I did now find myself confronted with a few concessions of my own to make. Ahem. He came into the room - perhaps it is no coincidence that the room we fell in love with when viewing the house was a room with floor to ceiling bookshelves. And last week, I sat there on the floor, surrounded by the reality of my book buying habits of the last 25 years. Charles laughed so much I was tempted to shut the lid of the ancient Samsonite briefcase from his very first job (which he was carrying to the condemned pile) hard on his fingers, just to shut him up, but I refrained. The ball was most definitely in my court.

I recently cleared out my wardrobe - again - after being inspired to do by Cait Flanders’s The Year of Less: How I Stopped Shopping, Gave Away My Belongings and Discovered Life is Worth More Than Anything You Can Buy in a Store. Yes, that’s right, I bought a book about how and why I should buy less. The author of that book claimed that by clearing out all the things she didn’t wear or need, she was confronted by all the money she had wasted over the years. It then also made it easier for her to find and appreciate what she did have. And thus both things together had made it so much easier not to buy any more. I’ve already been very focussed on not buying new things - I’m not as brave as some who claim they are not buying anything new for 10 years (though, goodness, I am full of admiration for them), but I have now implemented this author’s rule of only replacing things when they are beyond repair and also having a list of “approved purchases”, thus in theory ruling out impulse purchases, even the relatively sustainable ones. I’m only a month or so in, but it’s working rather well and so I thought I would try and apply it to my book situation. And as I started to put books into piles, I realised that not only were many of the books bringing back memories, but each pile was telling me something about myself.

Always books somewhere in the background… Claire Bowen with her bouquet

Image by Maria Lamb

The first pile I made was the urgent books - the ones I am currently reading or need to read right away or have on hand for consultation purposes. The ones that need more of my focus and attention than my piano practice ever got. The last year has seen a generous glut of flower and gardening books and I have been busy buying and absorbing quite a few of them. These are for work and so I don’t need to feel guilty about buying them either, so it’s a win:win. Our cottage came with a garden that is somewhere between a third and half an acre, not huge, but big enough for me to finally start growing some flowers of my own. Which is a wonderful thing except that I am a complete novice. I didn’t grow up in the country and apart from the notes I have from a cut flower course I attended - a little pre-emptively - at Green & Gorgeous in 2017 and the garden plan from the Redesign Your Garden class I have just attended at The Land Gardeners (both very helpful classes and highly recommended), I actually have very little to go on. So gardening and flower books are at the very top of my list. All the ones in this pile have been reviewed by others more knowledgeable than me, but in case you were wondering, I have chosen to prioritise:

In Bloom by Clare Nolan - the most wonderful introduction to growing and harvesting flowers, so well set out so that even a beginner like me can understand, honestly, it’s a revelation!

The Cut Flower Garden by Floret Farm - needs no introduction from me.

Cut Flowers by The Land Gardeners - Bridget and Henrietta’s stunning book full of inspiration, plans, plants and beautiful photography

Gertrude Jekyll and The Country House Garden by Judith Tankard - A wonderful Oxfam online find

The English Roses by David Austen - I am still pondering which climbers to grow up the walls of the studio

The Thoughtful Gardener by Jinny Blom - a present from a friend that I keep coming back to for planting schemes

On Flowers by Amy Merrick - surely a modern classic, a review I read described it as a book about “being alive to flowers” and I think that is a perfect description.

(At the time of writing I am still eagerly awaiting the arrival of Laetitia Maklouf’s The Five Minute Garden which I suspect will be perfect for keeping me on the straight and narrow as I navigate my way to instilling, and then maintaining some order on our currently unkempt garden).

I didn’t know whether Amy’s book fell under the category of gardening or floristry with its all encompassing approach, perhaps the fact that it falls into both is what makes it so utterly wonderful. Well, that and the beautiful writing and the ethereal quality that Amy brings to her work. Also, no matter, for the reason I am so busy planting flowers is to use them in my flower studio where books on floristry also have a very welcome home…

The Flower Fix by Anna Potter . Another classic in the making, showing not only instructions on how to recreate Anna’s inimitable style (I think I’ve contradicted myself there) , but also with a hugely helpful section on foam free mechanics at the back

A Year in Flowers by Floret Farm - the latest book from Erin and every bit as brilliant as the first. I was so excited that I accidentally ordered two but I don’t know a single person who hasn’t bought it.

The Flower Art of Japan by Mary Averill (I am very interested in learning more about Ikebana in its own right and also hope to apply Japanese rules on form into larger, more traditional pieces)

The Art of Wearable Flowers by Susan McLeary - hit my doormat yesterday and I’m so excited to read this and try some of her beautiful ideas.

I am also eagerly awaiting the release of Cultivated by Christin Geall (given the vast amount of research that has gone into this book, following Christin’s stories as she heads to libraries all around the world, and also given her beautiful floral style, I know this is going to be one of the best books in a long time). It’s also not long now until lovely Bex Partridge of Botanical Tales releases her book Everlastings and Floribunda Rose’s A Guide to Floral Mechanics, eagerly anticipated after its Kickstarter last year, should soon be heading to the printers. Time to start making some room for the newcomers, then!

Floral design by Louise Langdon in the Library at Strawberry Hill House

Image by Eva Nemeth

As I sift further through my book piles, I am struck by how lucky we are to have such an abundance of information and inspiration available to us these days. When I first dreamed o being a florist and took myself off on flower classes in the evenings and weekends, I also spent time hunting down flower books. I used to work just off Regent Street, and at the end of a long day, before hopping on the No 38 back to Hackney, I used to visit the Fourth Floor of Waterstones Piccadilly. For there, in a corner on the far left hand side, were my two favourite sections, fine art and gardening/ floristry. But there was a real paucity of titles available, so very different from the situation now. I smile as I survey some of the books from those days - all are very wonderful, but so very different in style to where I find myself now: Classic Paula Pryke, Table Flowers and Living Colour, both by Paula Pryke, World Flowers by Jane Packer , Pure Beauty, Pure Style - Flowers by Tricia Guild, Living with Flowers Nice de Suert, Flowers by Design by Jeff Latham and the wonderful Seasonal Bouquets by Christian Tortu. Right now we are in the middle of a Constnce Spry revival, all eagerly awaiting the retrospective being organised by Shane Connolly with the Garden Museum, but if in another 20 years from now, floristry of the late 90s and early 00s have a revival and you’re looking for artefacts, then goodness me, I’m your girl!

But so far, so much as to be expected. Flower and gardening books are par for the course for most people doing what I now do. So what else did I find? When trying to work out some sort of system of where to put things, rather adopting the random, scattergun approach favoured by my husband, I started to sift books into piles - art history, fiction, cookery and self help.

By far the biggest of these is art history. I spent much of my twenties collecting degrees and absorbing information as I went. These were the days of little or no tuition fees, days when the council paid for your undergraduate course (in my case, Latin with Greek, as can be evidenced from the odd copy of Ovid or Herodotus on our bookshelves), and where post graduate fees were not completely back breaking. I stayed at home, earning my keep by shopping and cooking and by helping to look after my little sister during the holidays, I worked behind a bar in Chiswick three nights a week and the paltry sums I made there covered my tube fares and the occasional book that was oversubscribed at the Courtauld Library. I carried on studying until my late 20s, when having passed my viva to transfer from MPhil to PhD my scholarship ran out. By this stage I had a mortgage to pay and I was faced with the choice of getting a job to pay my mortgage or selling my flat and carrying on. Seeing it as a temporary situation, I applied to put my study on ice for a year, and went off to temp at an Estate Agents in Belgravia. It was a difficult transition, to go from teaching postgraduate students about art markets and semiotics to being deemed not qualified enough to do anything other than file and type, but the money was better and it paid the mortgage and the idea of going out in the evening instead of pouring over books was so appealing. As the years went by, my research, still on ice, became less current or topical as many others wrote on what was once a ground breaking subject. With each year, I became more accustomed to the graft and though the fields in which I worked changed, and in spite of some wonderful bosses, I was rarely taken seriously by colleagues. I nearly walked out one day when, sitting at my desk whilst others were at a meeting, a man walked in to the office said “is there anyone here worth taking to?” and, after quickly surveying the room and seeing only me said”no”. Apparently he was an SC. I still don’t know what that means, (I could proffer a few suggestions) but I do know that he had the good grace to flush red when I replied with an expletive in response. I’m not normally a rude or sweary person and it took me by surprise too, to be honest. Perhaps if he had reported me to HR that day, my journey into the world of flowers would have been a quicker one, but I’ve reached it finally anyway, and all of this now is just extra colour. In case you are wondering what that small digression was about my point is that when surveying all these art history books, I am reminded of just how much art and my studies meant to me and why I still feel a tinge of sadness when I think of opportunities not quite fulfilled.

That said, many of those art books that I have come across have made me smile and some will prove to be incredibly useful. I rediscovered a pile of very niche books on the art work of Beatrix Potter, not just Mrs Tiggywinkle and Jeremy Fisher, but her floral artwork. Her flower drawings are quite exquisite and formed the main body of her work, even if she is rather more famous for her anthropomorphic animals. But what made me smile was the memory of a conversation in a pub in Farnham in the mid 1990s with my friends Nick, Mike and Jon. It was time to choose a subject for my MA thesis and I was flummoxed as to what I could write about in the realms of Fine Art Valuation. One of them bet me £50 I wouldn’t get away with submitting something on Beatrix potter, so that’s exactly what I did. In the end it was a very complex thesis looking into why the artwork for the books fetched far higher prices than most of her botanical studies, using semiotics normally applied to the decoding of advertisements to recreation of childhood memories and all that that entailed. But it was still about Beatrix Potter - I opted for being let off a round of drinks rather than insisiting on my full £50.

Another great find was Paul Taylor’s Dutch Flower Painting , a book written to coincide with an exhibition of Dutch Flower Art at the Dulwich Picture Gallery in 1996. At the time, Dutch flower pantings, like so much 17th Century art, was not considered at all fashionable. I went to see it purely because I was studying Counter Reformation Art at the time, and it was an opportunity to see contemporaneous artists from another country/ genre. I was, however transfixed by what I saw, and those paintings - now, by contrast, so popular they appear on almost every feed and course description (including my own) - deeply moved me from that time on. From there, I also acquired other Dutch art books: ones on Vermeer and social studies on Dutch culture in the Golden Age. How nicely they dovetail in with books like The Tulip by Anna Pavord that have inspired me in my flower studies. And now I begin to realise, that whilst I might not have fulfilled my dream of completing my PhD, neither were those years wasted either.

Flowers and image by Sarah Statham

(Book is The Priory by Dorothy Whipple, one of our very favourites)

I begin to relax, lost in memories as they swirl around me in the room. They say music is so evocative of recollection, but I would argue that books are too. Next to tackle is the fiction section. I’ve made some very happy, long lasting friendships over the love of a good book. A now very dear friend who married my upstairs neighbour in Battersea who shares a deep passion for all things Agatha Christie, another met dog walking in Hackney with whom I bonded over Mapp and Lucia and Dorothy Whipple. And another, florist friend who I discovered loved Persephone publications as much as I did and was also reading Dorothy Whipple, suggested I set up an Instagram Book Club for flowery people. It was enormous fun, choosing a book and chatting about it online, but alas a change in the algorithms meant that not all the posts were seen on time, and it looked as though I might have forgotten and so it fell by the wayside, but we got through some Marganita Laski, E M Delafield, Elizabeth von Arnim as well as some Dorothy in the meantime, And from this came more online flowery friendships. I managed to attend the Daylesford book club for a few months before life got a bit too busy, but I still subscribe to the newsletter from the Bolshoi Bookshop so I know what they are reading each month so I can read the books anyway, even if I can’t get to the conversation. Likewise there is a book club here in our village, I just haven’t had time to get there yer - rather as with the monthly coffee mornings - but hope that I shall do eventually.

Deciding what to do with the fiction I have already read is no mean feat. I’m not naturally a hoarder, but I do like to return to my books. I decide to hold onto my Persephones and my Vintage Classics. Fiction that I have read and enjoyed, but portably won’t re read, I have put on a bookshelf in our guest room so that any visitor can start a book knowing that they can take it wth them if they don’t finish it in time. I also decide to allow myself up to twenty of my favourite books that don’t have matching covers and spines - top amongst these are Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things, Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel Garcia Marquez, When the Emperor was Divine by Julie Osaka, (and The Buddha in the Attic by the same author), The Infatuations by Javier Marías, The Elegance of the Hedgehog by Muriel Barbary and A Far Cry from Kensington by Muriel Spark… oh dear, it’s going to be a lot more than twenty. But never mind. Each book taught a specific lesson or invoked feelings that merit one or more rereads and, as such, they are precious commodities.

Flatlay and image by Claire Bowen

One area that has needed to be drastically pared down is the cookery section, which was vast. Growing up, I spent a lot of my early years with my grandmother, who had at one time been head cook to Edward VIII before his abdication. My memories of her all involve her being in the kitchen - she had taught me how to make a chicken stock at the tender age of six, which I’m sure would be frowned upon in this day and age, not only because I am now vegan, but because most social workers would - quite rightly - recoil in horror at the thought of a child that young amongst the boiling pots. Conversely, my mother worked very long hours and had no time for or real interest in cooking, and so it fell to me to fulfil that role in our little family, which I gladly did. I recently attended a Japanese tofu class in Shoreditch where I bumped into an old university friend I had lost touch with some decades ago. our friendship had been cemented by a love of Marcela Hazan and Antonio Carlucci’s cookbooks, and these still feature prominently in my repertoire now, as do Ursula Ferrigno and a host of other Italian chefs. I start by clearing out all the books containing meat recipes as it’s been almost thirty years since I consulted any of those. This gets rid of a huge swathe of books. I’m very attached to a pile of them from the 1900s, when even vegetarian books were not as common as they might have been. I allow myself to keep my prized books by Dennis Cotter, definitely not vegan but full of happy memories. Likewise more recent veggie books by Anna Jones, all of which have been a revelation and with so many adaptable recipes, or ones that already are without dairy. The same applies to The Green Kitchen books. Nigel Slater’s Christmas Chronicles escapes the purist cull on the basis that I look forward to reading this text from November onwards and his pea and jerusalem artichoke soup alone merits shelf space. Ottolenghi’s tomes are staying and so are Antonio Carluccio’s. But the rest that remain are very up to date and reflect my favoured cuisines and style of cooking now - largely based upon Asian cookery (which never contained dairy in the first place, so I don’t miss it). Meera Sodha’s East is by far my most used cook book of the last year - whether omnivore, vegan or flexetarian, I cannot possibly recommend it enough. Sitting proudly next to it are Bento Power by the fabulous Sara Kiyo Popowa and Jackfruit and Blue Ginger by Sasha Gill. The rest are a combination of Vegan Street Food and Japanese Temple Cuisine. I wonder if, by giving way the other books, I am going to miss a part of me, of my memories or some such sentiment. In the end I decide that to keep them would be like keeping dresses I can no longer fit into, or which i haven’t worn for years, and that it is better to let them go. I say goodbye to Delia Smith with her egg cooking lessons and Nigella Lawson and her cupcakes….. I narrow it down from 105 books to just 40, meaning that 65 are headed to charity shops nearby, hopefully to homes who will still love and use them as I have.

And so, my job is complete. The shelves are neat and tidy and I have had many wonderful hours reminiscing on times gone by in the process. It’s been every bit as enjoyable as going through boxes of old photographs or listening to favourite songs. But those of you who are still reading (for which, thank you) and awake, you will be wondering about all those self help books. I have come to the conclusion that, whilst for many people they are wonderful things, I am not really very good at engaging with these tomes. I have long since accepted that Men are from Mars and Women are (indeed) from Venus and there’s precious little I can do about it… they were quickly boxed up with the 65 cookery books and headed off to the charity shops before you can say The Power of Now. I have, instead, found everything I need in my Spring 1987 school report which my husband gleefully read to me earlier “ She usually works well although she sometimes allows herself to be distracted. Her written work is usually quite good but and she always participates well orally”. and the last word goes to my hockey mistress ‘She always works hard, but must try to speed up!”. Very good advice for 2020, there’s going to be rather a lot to do, I think.

Thank you for reading x